Every design starts as an idea; but how is that idea translated to physical products? A conceptual designer takes care in translating that initial conception. Graphic and web designers play an essential part of communicating a brand visually through graphic and web design, but conceptual designers need a blueprint connecting original concept with finished product before starting any designs. Knowing how to transform fascinating ideas into workable designs efficiently is what conceptual design is about - let's talk more about this approach efficiently.
Conceptual design is an integral component of any new product or system development project. Here you must clearly communicate to all your stakeholders, users and developers the concept, goals, features and requirements that define your solution, while aligning vision, validating assumptions and planning implementation accordingly.
Conceptual Design
What is Conceptual design? Conceptual design provides a strategy to transform concepts or ideas into visual media, serving as the cornerstone of successful design processes and projects alike. Without conceptual design in place, no project would ever begin.
Conceptual design echoes concept art - artwork that expresses a creator's imagined outcomes for an unfinished project - often used during pre production of movies or video games to serve as guidance to their creative teams, similar to web designing where conceptual designs serve to establish an overarching blueprint prior to moving onto more specific details like color and typography.
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What Steps Go Into Creating A Conceptual Design?
Concept designers' primary objective is to translate client ideas into concrete forms through design. Every designer has a different creative process; as you embark on concept design it's essential that you find out your own. A set process will ensure no steps are missed when beginning concept design work. Let's go over some essential steps that are involved with conceptual designing ideas-
Define The Issue Or Service Required
Before beginning any design project, the initial step must be establishing its purpose and intended outcome. What problems is this undertaking intended to address? Undertake an initial analysis by creating a problem statement; this provides a brief outline of what needs to be solved.
Assume for instance that your client is a toy company looking for a website to advertise its latest superhero action figures; but as part of its branding guidelines they prohibit using words related to violence or destruction such as "explosion" and "boom." Problem Statement for this Client's Project could read as "Superhero toys are attractive to children but often contain violent imagery unsuitable for younger demographics. As a conceptual designer, your task will be to draft an online presence which successfully advertises the toy while meeting client requests for tone-appropriateness.
Understand Client, Brand And Audience
Once you have established the problem statement, identify your client, brand, and audience. Knowing these factors will enable you to create distinct conceptual designs which outshone competitors; creating products tailored specifically towards customers' interests and values while carving a niche for yourself in their industry.
Let's use the toy company as an example once more: their brand includes guidelines and policies of inclusivity, accessibility and nonviolence as they aim to cater to parents whose parenting styles align with those embraced by this client's values. Parents make up your target audience, so before designing a website it is essential that you study their purchasing patterns, behavior and preferences in detail. A conceptual designer must incorporate client branding in such a manner as to please both client and audience alike.
Research Competitors And Industry Landscape
Conceptual design begins with research. Assess what competitors are doing with their websites and their design choices - do they meet their goals, are there missing components, is there an aspect you could use as inspiration in creating something similar yourself, etc?
Take the time to visit competitors' websites and take notes about your overall experience using criteria like user experience, readability and ease of use to evaluate them. Observe how user journeys progress across their platform before you compare performance against similar websites.
Researching competitors offers insight into industry norms. You'll gain an understanding of what doesn't work to implement better strategies for your client's business, while exploring other designers' work can provide inspiration; perhaps discovering concepts with themes you hadn't considered. Create a mood board from these designs as visual reference points during design processes from concepts through final designs; this process will develop your eye for detail while helping hone team members' execution of vision as you improve as a designer.
Brainstorm With Your Team
Talking through your ideas aloud can often help bring them into reality; that is where brainstorming comes into play. Brainstorming is an idea-generation technique in which team members exchange thoughts. Mind mapping and free association are excellent approaches for conceptual design; start with one word or phrase as your base word or phrase and list out words associated with it either alphabetically (free association) or branch outward from it (mind mapping), until strong ideas come to life that inspire design concepts.
For this exercise, your goal should be to organize related thoughts into an overarching statement that accurately represents your concept and what you aim to accomplish. For example, happiness could include words such as smile and laugh as subcomponents of happiness; design-wise this could mean using bold fonts with vivid hues as well as maximalist designs to symbolize these concepts.
Read More: Mastering the Art of Conceptual Design: Essential Things You Need to Know
Create And Sketch Concept Drafts
Conceptual designs use sketches as an effective method to transform abstract thoughts into tangible depictions, using either pencil and paper or software to accomplish this process. At first, your aim should be to convey as many visuals of your thoughts on paper or screen as you possibly can in one session. Try sketching quickly to unleash ideas. Don't get lost in minute details - your goal here should simply be tangible visualizations of a concept; not an exact portrayal of its final form.
At this stage, it's vital that your ideas come alive on screen - brainstorming is great for providing inspiration but ultimately their worthiness depends on being presented visually on screen. Furthermore, sometimes sketches turn out better than expected.
Create And Perfect A Prototype
Once your sketches have met your approval, the next step should be creating a more accurate representation of your design in the form of a prototype or mock up that others can look over and provide feedback on. Although not meant to be perfect - remember it's just an initial blueprint - it should give an accurate impression of what a finished design might look like for clients.
After receiving approval from project managers, clients, and stakeholders for your final product design, make any necessary modifications before moving forward with production. If feedback from any sources was less than positive, revisit earlier steps until better solutions can be designed - this process often requires multiple iterations cycles before its conclusion is reached.
Benefits of Conceptual design
Some of the benefits of Conceptual design are-
- The first benefit of conceptual design is that it makes clear the capabilities and intended applications of a product. This is critical to the product development process.
- The creation of an intuitive and easy-to-use user interface is facilitated by conceptual designs.
- It helps to thoroughly describe the roles of different users and their requirements in order to make sure that the project is better understood.
- It will be simpler to achieve the intended outcomes thanks to the design's careful consideration of the user's points of view.
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Conclusion
Concept design serves as the cornerstone of successful projects. Leverage research and creativity to master this art and streamline your product development process. Successful communication and presentation of concept designs play a pivotal role in winning support and understanding from key stakeholders.
Create captivating presentations using storytelling techniques or harness the visual storytelling power to effectively present your concepts to them. Conceptual design services represent a critical stage in product design and development. Designers use conceptual models as the starting point to communicate intended functions of systems to users.
